chapter eight

30 Mirtul, the Year of Risen Elfkin

Delhumide gleamed like a broken skeleton in the moonlight. The siege engines and battle sorceries of the ancient rebels had shattered battlements and toppled towers, and time had chipped and scraped at all that had survived the initial onslaught. Yet the Mulhorandi had built their provincial capital to last, and much remained essentially intact. Bareris found it easy to imagine the proud, teeming city of yore, which only served to make the present desolation all the more forbidding.

He wondered if it was simply his imagination, or if he truly could sense a miasma of sickness and menace infusing the place. Either way, the gnolls plainly felt something too. They growled and muttered. One clasped a copper medallion stamped with the image of an axe and prayed for the favor of his god.

Having cajoled them this far, Bareris didn’t want to give them a final chance to lose their nerve. As before, enchantment lent him the ability to speak to them in their own snarling, yipping language, and he used it to say, “Let’s move.” He skulked forward, and they followed.

He prayed they weren’t already too late, that something horrible hadn’t already befallen Tammith. It was maddening to reflect on just how much time had passed since he’d watched the Red Wizards and their cohorts march her away. It had taken him and the hyenafolk a while to reach Delhumide. Then, for all that the gnolls had scouted the general area before, Wesk Backbreaker insisted on observing the perimeter of the city before venturing inside. He maintained it would increase their chances of success, and much as Bareris chafed at the delay, he had to admit the gnoll chieftain was probably right.

As they’d gleaned all they could, so too had they begun to plan. After some deliberation, they decided to sneak into Delhumide by night. True, it was when the demons and such came out, but even if the horrors were in fact charged with guarding the borders of the ruined city, it didn’t appear they did as diligent a job as the warriors keeping watch by day. Bareris hoped he and the gnolls had a reasonable chance of slipping past them unmolested, especially considering that though creatures like devils and the hyenafolk themselves could see in the dark, they couldn’t see as far as a man could by daylight.

He and his companions picked their way through the collapsed and decaying houses outside the city wall then over the field of rubble that was all that remained of the barrier at that point. The bard wondered what particular mode of attack had shattered it. The chunks of granite had a blackened, pitted look, but that was as much as he could tell.

The gnolls slinking silently as mist for all their size, the intruders reached the end of the litter of smashed stones fairly quickly. Now they’d truly entered Delhumide, venturing deeper than any of their scouts had dared to go before. A cool breeze moaned down the empty street, and one of the hyenafolk jumped as if a ghost had ruffled his fur and crooned in its ear.

Wesk waved, signaling for everyone to follow him to the left. Their observations had revealed that shadowy figures flitted through the streets on the right in the dark. Occasionally, one of the things shrieked out peals of laughter that inspired a sudden self-loathing and the urge to self-mutilate in all who heard it. Bareris had no idea what the entities were, but he was certain they’d do well to avoid them.

The intruders turned again to avoid a trio of spires that, groaning and shedding scraps of masonry, sometimes flexed like the fingers of a palsied hand. The facades of crumbling houses seemed to watch them go by, the black empty windows following like eyes. For a moment, a sort of faint clamor like the final fading echo of a hundred screams sounded somewhere to the north.

The noise made Bareris shiver, but he told himself it had nothing to do with him or his comrades. Delhumide was replete with perils and eerie phenomena; they’d known that coming in. It wasn’t a problem if you could keep away from them, and so far their reconnaissance had enabled them to do so.

That luck held for another twenty heartbeats. Then one of the gnolls deviated from their course by just a long, loping stride or two, just far enough to stick his head into a courtyard with a rusty wrought-iron gate hanging askew and a cracked, dry fountain in the center. Something had evidently snagged the warrior’s attention, some hint of danger, perhaps, that demanded closer scrutiny.

The gnoll suddenly snarled and staggered, tearing at himself with his thick canine nails. At first Bareris couldn’t make out what was wrong, but when he saw the swelling black dots scurrying through the creature’s spotted fur, he understood.

The gnolls had fleas, a fact he’d discovered when he started scratching as well, and the parasites on the outlaw in the courtyard were growing to prodigious size. Big as mice, they swarmed over him, burying their proboscises and heads in his flesh to drain his blood. Bulges shifted under the gnoll’s brigandine as insects crawled and feasted there as well.

A second gnoll rushed to help his fellow, but as soon as he entered the courtyard, he suffered the same affliction. The two hyenafolk flailed and rolled and shrieked together. Their fellows hovered outside the gate, too frightened or canny to risk the same consequence.

Bareris sang. Magic warmed the air, and he felt a sort of tickling as his own assortment of normal-sized fleas jumped off him. He then charged into the courtyard, and the enchantment radiating outward from his skin drove the giant parasites off the bodies of their hosts just as easily. With a rustling, seething sound, they scuttled and bounded into the shadows at the rear of the space.

He still had no desire to linger inside the crooked gate. For all he knew, the influence haunting the courtyard had other tricks to play. Fast as he could, he dragged the dazed, bloody gnolls back out onto the street, where the spirit, or whatever it was, couldn’t hurt them any further. At least he hoped it couldn’t, because they needed a healer’s attention immediately if they were to escape infirmity or worse, and in the absence of a priest, he’d have to do.

He chanted charms of mending and vitality. The other gnolls looked on curiously until Wesk started grabbing them and wrenching them around. “Keep watch!” the chieftain snarled. “Something else could have heard the ruckus or hear the singer singing.”

Gradually, one gnoll’s wounds stopped bleeding and scabbed over, a partial healing that was as much as Bareris could manage for the time being. The other, however, appeared beyond help. He shuddered, a rattle issued from his throat, then he slumped motionless. Meanwhile, the survivor sat up and, hand trembling, groped for the leather water bottle strapped to his belt.

“How are you?” Bareris asked him.

The gnoll snorted as if the question were an insult.

“Then when you’re ready, we’ll press on.”

“Are you crazy?”

Bareris turned and saw that the speaker was Thovarr Keentooth, the long-eared gnoll he’d punched during their first palaver.

“You said you knew how to get us in and out without the spooks bothering us,” the creature snarled, spit flying from his jaws. He apparently meant to continue in the same vein for a while, but Wesk interrupted by backhanding him across the muzzle and tumbling him to the ground.

“We said,” the chieftain growled, “we’d do our best to avoid the threats we knew about, but there might be some we hadn’t spotted. This was one such, and you can’t blame the human or anyone else for missing it, seeing as how it was invisible till someone stepped in the snare.”

“I’m not talking about ‘blame,’” Thovarr replied, picking himself up. “I’m talking about what’s sensible and what isn’t. There’s a reason no one comes here, and—”

“Blood orcs do,” Bareris said. “Are they braver than you?”

Thovarr bared his fangs like an angry hound. “The pig-faces have Red Wizards to guide them. We only have you, and you talk big but don’t keep us out of trouble.”

“Enough!” snapped Wesk. “We’re soldiers again, and soldiers expect to risk their lives earning their pay. If you don’t have the belly for it, turn back now, but know it means the rest of us cast you out for a coward.”

That left Thovarr with three options: obey, leave his little pack forever, or fight Wesk then and there for his chieftaincy. Apparently the first choice was the most palatable, the perils of Delhumide notwithstanding, because the long-eared gnoll bent his head in submission. “I’ll stick,” he growled.

They dragged the dead warrior’s corpse into a shadowy recessed doorway, where, they hoped, it was less likely anyone or anything would notice it. There they abandoned it without ceremony. Bareris had dealt just as callously with the mortal remains of other fallen comrades when a battle, pursuit, or flight required immediate action, and he had no idea whether gnolls even practiced any sort of funerary observances. It wouldn’t have astonished him to learn that they ate their dead as readily as they devoured any other sort of meat or carrion that came their way. Still, he found it gave him a pang of remorse to leave the creature unburied and unburned, without even a hymn or prayer to speed its soul on its way.

Maybe it bothered him because Thovarr was essentially correct. If Bareris hadn’t used magic to undermine the gnolls’ better judgment, they would never have ventured into Delhumide. His friends from more squeamish—or as they might have put it, more ethical—lands might well have deemed it an abuse of his gifts.

But his present comrades were hyenafolk, who boasted themselves that their kind lived only for war and slaughter, and Bareris was paying them a duke’s ransom to put themselves in harm’s way. If he’d sinned, then the Lord of Song could take him to task for it when his spirit knelt before the deity’s silver throne. For now, he’d sacrifice the gnolls and a thousand more like them to rescue Tammith.

Wesk lifted a hand to halt the procession. On the other side of an arched gateway rose a cylindrical tower. Constructed of dark stone, vague in the darkness, it reminded Bareris of some titan’s drum.

He peeked around the edge of the gate and squinted at the flat roof, but he couldn’t spot anything on top of it. He’d considered singing a charm to sharpen his eyes before entering the city but had opted not to. He could only cast so many spells before exhausting his powers. Better, then, to trust the night vision of his companions and conserve his magic for other purposes.

“Is it up there?” he whispered, referring to the blood-orc sentry that usually kept watch on the roof.

Wesk bobbed his head up above the low wall ringing the tower to check. “Yes.”

“Can you really hit it from down here?” Bareris asked.

He knew Wesk was a skillful archer, maybe even as adept as he claimed. He’d watched the gnoll shoot game on the trek to Delhumide, and only once had the creature missed. Still, Bareris was enough of a bowman in his own right to know just how difficult a shot it was. The orc was four stories up and partly shielded by a ring of merlons.

Wesk grinned. “I can hit it. I’m not some feeble runt of a human.”

He caressed the curves of his yew bow and growled a spell of his own, evidently some charm known to master archers and hunters. The longbow glinted as though catching Selûne’s light in a way it hadn’t before, despite the fact that nothing had changed in the sky. Wesk nocked an arrow, stepped into the center of the gate, drew the fletchings to his ear, and let the missile fly.

To Bareris’s eyes, the shaft simply vanished into the dark, but from Wesk’s grunt of satisfaction, and the fact that he didn’t bother reaching for a second arrow, it was evident the first one had found its mark. Bareris imagined the orc collapsing, killed before it even had an inkling it was in peril.

He and the gnolls skulked across the open ground between the wall and the tower. They had no reason to think anyone else was looking—it seemed likely the rest of the folk inside were happy to shut themselves away from the terrors infesting the night—but they couldn’t be sure.

Stone steps rose to a four-paneled door. As Bareris climbed toward it, he hoped to find only a handful of warriors waiting on the other side. Whoever was garrisoning this particular outpost, though, he and the hyenafolk had no choice but to deal with them.

That was because one could only see so far into a ruined city while scouting it from the outside, and thus the intruders had little idea what lay beyond this point. If they were to avoid lurking demons and locate Tammith, someone would have to enlighten them.

Bareris tried the door and found that, as expected, it was locked or barred. He motioned for the gnolls to stay behind him then bellowed.

The magic infusing his voice cracked the door and jolted it on its hinges but failed to break it open. He threw himself against it and bounced back with a bruised shoulder, but then Wesk and Thovarr charged past him and hit the barrier together. They smashed it out of its frame to slam down on the floor of the hall beyond. Orcs, three kneeling in a circle around their dice and piles of coppers, and two more wrapped in their blankets, goggled at them in amazement.

As it turned out, there were no mages on hand, and with the orcs caught unprepared, the fight that followed was less a battle than a massacre. In fact, that was the problem. Caught up in the frenzy of the moment, the gnolls appeared to have forgotten that the point of their incursion was to take at least one of the enemy alive.

Bareris cast about. For a moment, he could see only gory, motionless, gray-skinned bodies and the hyenafolk still hacking at them. Then he spotted an orc that was down on its back but still moving, albeit in a dazed manner, groping for the dirk in its boot. Thovarr swung his axe over his head to finish the creature off.

“No!” Bareris shouted. He lunged and shoved Thovarr away from the orc, swiped the latter’s hand with the flat of his sword to stop its reaching for the knife, and aimed his point at its throat. “We have to talk to one of them, and this appears to be the only one left.”

He proceeded with the interrogation as soon as the gnolls verified that the rest of the tower was empty. “You can answer my questions and live,” he told the orc in its own language, “or I can give you to my friends to kill in whatever fashion amuses them. It’s up to you.”

“I can’t tell you anything!” the orc pleaded. “I’ll die!”

“Nonsense. Perhaps your masters will punish you for talking if they get their hands on you, but you can run away.”

“That’s not it,” said the orc. “The Red Wizards put a spell on me, on all of us. If we talk about their business, we die.”

From the manner in which he attended to the conversation, it was apparent Wesk understood the orcish tongue, and now he and Bareris exchanged puzzled glances. The bard wondered again what endeavor merited such extraordinary attempts at secrecy.

“Listen to me,” Bareris said, infusing his voice with the magic of persuasion, “you don’t know that your masters truly laid a spell on you. It would have been a lot less work simply to lie and claim they did. Even if the enchantment is real, you can’t be sure it took you in its grip. It’s the nature of such charms that they can always fail to affect a particular target. On the other hand, you know my sword is real. You see it with your own eyes, and you can be absolutely certain of dying if I cut your throat with it. Bearing all that in mind, whom do you choose to obey, the wizards or me?”

The orc took a deep breath. “I’ll answer.”

“Good. Where in the city do the slaves end up?”

The prisoner sucked in another breath. Bareris realized the orc was panting with fear. “They—”

A single word was all it took. The orc’s back arched, and surprised, Bareris failed to yank his sword back in time to avoid piercing the orc’s neck. But the point didn’t go in deep, and he doubted the orc even noticed the wound. The orc was suffering far more grievous hurts.

The orc’s back continued to bend like a bow, and his extremities flailed up and down, pounding the floor. His eyes rolled up in their sockets, and bloody froth foamed from his mouth. Hoping the creature might survive if he could only keep him from swallowing his tongue, Bareris cast about for an implement he could wedge in his mouth, but before he could find one, the orc thrashed a final time and lay still. A foul smell suffused the air. The warrior had soiled himself in his death throes.

“Well,” said Wesk, “it wasn’t lying about the geas.”

“No,” Bareris answered.

He felt a twinge of shame for compelling the orc to such a death, and scowling, he tried to quash the feeling. He’d had no choice but to force the creature to speak.

“So what do all of us ‘soldiers’ do now?” Thovarr asked. “Just wander around and look for the slave? Delhumide’s big, and it’s got a spook hiding in every shadow.”

Bareris prayed it hadn’t come to that. “We search this place,” he said. “Maybe we’ll find something useful.”

They began by searching the orcs’ bodies then moved on to ransacking their possessions. Wesk dumped out the contents of a haversack, picked up a parchment, unfolded it, and then brought it to Bareris.

“Is this anything?” asked the gnoll.

Bareris studied the scrawled diagram. It didn’t have any words written on it, just lines, circles, rectangles, and dots, and for a moment, he couldn’t decipher it. Then he noticed certain correspondences, or at least he hoped he did. He rotated the paper a quarter turn, and the proper orientation made the similitude unmistakable.

“It’s a map of this part of the city.”

Wesk eyed it dubiously. “Are you sure?”

“Yes. It’s difficult to tell because it’s crudely drawn and the orc left so much off, but this is the breach in the wall we came through, here are the laughing shadows, and here the towers that squirm of their own accord. The mapmaker used the black dots to indicate areas best avoided. This is the building we’re in now, and this box near the top must be the place where the Red Wizards themselves have taken up residence. Why else would anyone take the trouble to indicate the best path from here to there?”

The gnoll chieftain leered like a wolf spying a lost lamb. “Nice of the pig-faces to go to so much trouble just to help us out.”

With the map to guide them, they skulked nearly to the center of Delhumide without running afoul of any more malevolent spirits or mortal foes, but as Bareris peered expectantly, waiting for the structure indicated on the sketch to come into view, he felt a sudden difference and froze. The gnolls sensed something as well, and growling, they peered around.

It took Bareris a breath or two to puzzle out precisely what they’d all registered. Probably because it was the last thing he would have expected. “It’s … more pleasant here. The feeling of evil has lifted.”

“Why?” asked Wesk.

Bareris shook his head. “I don’t know. Just enjoy the relief while you can. I doubt it will last.”

It did, though, and when they finally beheld their goal, he knew why. It was a square-built, flat-roofed hall notable for high columns covered in carvings and towering statues of a manlike figure with the crowned head of a hawk. Thayans no longer worshiped Horus-Re, but bards picked up a miscellany of lore in the course of acquiring new songs and stories, and Bareris had no difficulty identifying the Mulhorandi god. The structure was a temple, built on hallowed ground and still exerting a benign influence on the immediate area centuries after.

Bareris shook his head. “I don’t understand. I’m sure it’s the right place, but why would the Red Wizards set up shop in a shrine like that?”

“The god’s power keeps the bogeys away,” suggested Wesk. “The bogeys the warlocks didn’t whistle up themselves, I mean.”

“Maybe, but wouldn’t the influence also make it more difficult to practice necromancy? It’s inherently—“

“What’s the difference?” Thovarr snapped.

Bareris blinked, then smiled. “Good point. We don’t care what they’re doing, how, or why. We just want to rescue Tammith and disappear into the night. We’ll keep our minds on that.”

Employing buildings, shadows, and piles of rubble for cover, they crept partway around the temple to look for sentries. It didn’t take Wesk long to spot a pair of gaunt figures with gleaming yellow eyes crouched atop the roof.

“Undead,” he said. “I can hit them, but zombies and the like are hard to kill. I don’t know if I can put them down before they sound the alarm.”

“Give me one of the arrows you mean to shoot,” Bareris said.

The gnoll handed it over, and Bareris crooned to it, the charm a steady diminuendo from the first note to the last. At its end, the whisper of the wind, the skritch-skritch-skritch of one of the gnolls scratching his mane, and indeed, the entire world fell silent.

Bareris handed the arrow back and waved his arm, signaling for Wesk to shoot when he was ready. The gnoll chieftain laid it on the string, jumped up from behind the remains of a broken wall, and sent it streaking upward. Sound popped back into the world as soon as the shaft carried its invisible bubble of quietude away.

Wesk’s followers shot their own arrows, and at least half found their mark, but as the gnoll had warned, the undead proved difficult to slay. Shafts jutting from their bodies like porcupine quills, they picked up bells from the rooftop and flailed them up and down. Fortunately, though, the sphere of silence now enshrouded them. The bells refused to clang, and after another moment, the amber-eyed creatures collapsed, first one and then the other.

Wesk balled up his fist and gave Bareris a stinging punch to the shoulder. “For a human,” said the gnoll, “you have your uses.”

“I like to think so,” Bareris replied. “Let’s go.”

Keeping low, they ran toward the temple. Their path carried them near a weathered statue of Horus-Re. In its youth, the figure had brandished an ankh to the heavens, but its upraised arm had broken off in the millennia since and now lay in fragments at its feet.

The temple proved to consist primarily of long, open, high-ceilinged galleries, with a relative scarcity of interior walls to separate one section from the next and no doors to seal any of the entrances and exits. To Bareris’s war-trained sensibilities, that made it a poor choice for a stronghold, but perhaps in Delhumide, the site’s aura of sanctity seemed a more important defense than any barrier of wood or stone.

In any case, he was far more concerned about something else. The temple was occupied. From time to time, they slipped past chambers where folk lay sleeping. But there were fewer than Bareris had expected, nor did he observe any indication that Red Wizards were practicing their arts here on a regular basis.

Eventually Wesk whispered the obvious, “If all those slaves were ever here, they aren’t anymore.”

“They must be,” Bareris said, not because he truly disagreed, but because he couldn’t bear to endorse the gnoll’s conclusion.

“Do you want to wake somebody and ask him?”

The bard shook his head. “Not unless he’s a mage. Any soldier would likely just go into convulsions like our orc. It’s not worth the risk of rousing the lot of them, at least not until we’ve searched the entire place.”

They prowled onward, looking for something, anything, to suggest an answer to the riddle of the missing thralls’ whereabouts. In time they found their way to a large and shadowy chamber at the center of the temple. Once, judging from the raised altar, the colossal statue of Horus-Re enthroned behind it, and faded paintings depicting his birth and deeds adoring the walls, the chamber had been the hawk god’s sanctum sanctorum. More recently, someone had erected a freestanding basket arch in the middle of the floor, its pale smooth curves a contrast to the brown, crumbling stonework on every side. When Bareris spotted it, he caught his breath in surprise.

“What?” whispered Wesk, twisting his head this way and that, looking for danger.

“The arch is a portal,” Bareris said, “a magical doorway linking this place to some other far away. I saw one during my travels and recognize the rune carved on the keystone.”

“Then we know what became of your female,” said Wesk.

“Apparently, but what sense does it make? If the Red Wizards want to do something in private, what haven is more private than Delhumide? No one comes here. Conversely, why bother with this dangerous place at all, if you’re only using it as a stepping stone to somewhere else?”

Wesk shrugged. “Maybe we’ll find out on the other side.”

“Hold on,” Thovarr said.

Bareris assumed he meant to point out the recklessness of walking through the gate when they had no idea where it led or what waited beyond, but before the gnoll could get going, a scarlet-robed figure stepped into view through a doorway midway up the left wall. At first, the wizard didn’t notice the intruders, and Thovarr had the presence of mind to fall silent. Wesk laid an arrow on his bow.

But as he drew it to his ear, the mage glimpsed the intruders from the corner of his eye, or sensed their presence somehow. He was wise enough not to waste breath and time crying for help that would surely arrive too late to save him, nor did he attempt to scramble back through the doorway as Bareris might have done. Perhaps the space he’d just vacated had only the one exit, and he didn’t want to trap himself.

Instead he flourished his hand, and the black ring on his thumb left a streak of shadow on the air. Each gripping a greatsword, four pairs of skeletal arms erupted from the band. They emerged tiny but swelled to full size in a heartbeat.

They were an uncanny sight to behold, and even Wesk faltered for an instant. The Red Wizard snarled words of power, and the bony arms flew at the gnoll and his companions. Ignoring the imminent threat of the greatswords, Wesk shot an arrow at the mage, unfortunately not quickly enough to keep the warlock from finishing his incantation. A floating disk of blue phosphorescence shimmered into being in front of him, and the arrow stuck in that instead, just as if it were a tangible wooden shield.

Then the disembodied arms hurtled into the distance and started cutting with their long, heavy blades. The intruders had the advantage of numbers, but even so, Bareris realized the wizard’s protectors would be difficult to defeat. The only way to stop them or even slow them down was to hit hard and square enough to cleave a length of bone entirely in two, and they flitted through the air so nimbly that it was a challenge to land a stroke at all.

But the necromancer was an even greater threat, and Bareris didn’t dare leave him to conjure unmolested. He stepped between a set of skeletal arms and Wesk, ducked a cut, and riposted, buying the gnoll chieftain the moment he needed to drop his bow and ready his axe. After that, though, the bard extricated himself from the whirl of blades and charged the mage who, the translucent, arrow-pierced disk still hovering between him and his foes, the skirt of his robe flapping around his legs, was himself sprinting toward the white stone archway. Apparently he believed safety, or at least help, awaited him on the other side.

Bareris was too far away to cut him off. He sang a charm so rapidly that he feared botching the precise rhythm and pitch required, but he didn’t have the option of taking his time.

Magic groaned through the air, and the section of floor under the Red Wizard’s feet bucked as though an earthquake had begun. The vibration knocked the mage staggering then dumped him on his rump. Bareris dashed on, closing in on the warlock while likewise interposing himself between his foe and the portal.

The Red Wizard thrust out his arm. A glyph tattooed on the back of his hand leaped free of his skin and became a hand itself, levitating and seemingly formed of shadow. It bobbed over the top of the floating shield, then streaked at Bareris.

The bard tried to dodge, but the hand grabbed him by the shoulder anyway. Agony stabbed outward from the point of contact to afflict his entire body.

It was the fiercest pain he’d ever experienced, severe enough to blind and paralyze, which was no doubt the object. Evidently still intent on reaching the gate, but looking to finish off his adversary as well, the necromancer simultaneously circled in the appropriate direction and hissed sibilant rhyming phrases.

The pain is in my mind, Bareris insisted to himself, and I can push it out. He struggled to straighten up, turn in the mage’s direction, and lift his sword once more. For a heartbeat, it was impossible, and then the bonds of torment constraining him ripped like a sheet of parchment tearing in two.

He spun around. His eyes widening, the necromancer appeared startled, but the floating shield automatically shifted to defend its creator as thoroughly as possible. Bareris poised himself as if he meant to dart to the right then dodged left instead. That fooled the shield and brought him within striking distance of the wizard. He drove his point into the other man’s chest. The enchanter fell back with his final incantation uncompleted.

Bareris studied the mage for another moment, making sure their duel was truly over, then pivoted to survey the rest of the battle. Two of the gnolls were down, but with a final chop of his axe, Thovarr was reducing the last of the disembodied arms to inert splinters of bone.

His allies’ success gave Bareris the opportunity to contemplate the enormity of what he’d done, or the seeming enormity. He’d earned a death by torture the moment he’d lifted his hand to So-Kehur and his skull-masked partner, so in practical terms, it shouldn’t matter that he’d now killed a Red Wizard outright.

Yet it gave him pause. The eight orders taught every person and certainly every pauper in Thay to think of their members as superior, invincible beings, and though Bareris’s experiences abroad had given him ample reason to feel confident of his own prowess, perhaps a part of him still believed the myth and was accordingly appalled at his temerity, but then a surge of satisfaction washed his trepidation away. After all, these were the bastards who’d taken Tammith away from him, and this particular specimen didn’t look so exalted or omnipotent anymore, did he?

Wesk trotted up to him, bow in hand once more. He had a cut on his forearm where a greatsword must have grazed him, but he wasn’t paying it any mind.

“I don’t hear anyone coming,” he said, “do you?”

Bareris listened. “No.” Evidently the fight hadn’t made a great deal of noise. He was glad he hadn’t needed to produce any of the prodigious booms or roars of which his magic was capable. He pointed to the gnolls still lying on the floor. “How are they?”

“Dead.” If Wesk felt bad about it, no human could have told it from his manner. “So what now?”

“We hide the bodies and what’s left of the skeleton arms. With luck, that will buy us more time before anyone else realizes we were here.”

“And then we go through the gate?”

Bareris opened his mouth to say yes, then thought better of it. “No. Thovarr’s right. We don’t know where it leads or what’s waiting beyond, but we do know the necromancer believed that if he could reach the other side, it would save him. That means he could have had a lot of allies there. More than we, with half our band already lost, can hope to overcome.”

Wesk cocked his head. “You didn’t come this far just to give up.”

“No, but I’m going on alone, clad in the dead wizard’s robe, in the hope that trickery will succeed where force would likely fail.”

“Did you notice that the robe has a bloody hole in it? You put it there.”

Bareris shrugged. “It’s not a big hole and not too bloody. Bodies don’t bleed much after the heart stops. If I throw a cloak on over the robe, perhaps no one will notice.”

He’d also sing a song to make himself seem more likable and trustworthy, the very antithesis of a person meriting suspicion, but saw no point in mentioning that. He was still leery of allowing the gnolls to guess the extent to which he’d used magic to manipulate them.

Wesk grunted. “Better, maybe, to disguise yourself with an illusion or be invisible.”

“Perhaps, but I don’t know those particular songs. Somehow I never had the chance to learn them. Now let’s get moving. We need don’t anybody else blundering in on us while we stand around talking.”

They dragged the bodies to the room from which the Red Wizard had emerged. It turned out to be a small, bare, rectangular space the clergy of Horus-Re might have used to store votive candles, incense, and similar supplies. Bareris wondered what the mage had been doing in here and realized he’d never know.

He was stripping his fellow human’s corpse when Wesk exclaimed, “Your hair.”

Bareris reflexively raised a hand to touch his tangled, sweaty locks. “Curse it!” Like any Mulan who hadn’t spent the last several years in foreign lands, the Red Wizards uniformly employed razors, depilatories, or magic to keep themselves bald as stones.

Wesk pulled his knife from its sheath. “I don’t suppose you can truly shave without lather and such, but I can shear your hair very short, and the robe has a cowl. Keep it pulled up and maybe you’ll pass.”

The gnoll proved to be about as gentle a barber as Bareris had expected. He yanked hard on the strands of hair, and the knife stung as it sawed them away. Bareris had no doubt it was nicking him.

“Gnolls take scalps for trophies sometimes,” said Wesk. “You make the first cut like this.” He laid the edge of his knife against Bareris’s forehead just below the hairline.

“I had a hunch that was what you were doing,” Bareris replied, and Wesk laughed his crazy, bestial laugh.

When the gnoll finished, Bareris brushed shorn hair off his shoulders and chest, put on the scarlet robe over his brigandine and breeches, then donned his cloak and sword belt. He hoped he could get away with wearing a sword. Though it wasn’t common, he’d seen other Red Wizards do the same. But he realized with regret that he’d have to leave his yarting behind. The musical instrument would simply be too unusual and distinctive.

He handed it to Wesk. “Take this. It’s not a ruby, but it’ll fetch a good price.”

The gnoll archer grinned. “Maybe I’ll keep it and learn to play.”

“Thank you all for your help. Now clear out of here. Try to be far away by daybreak.”

“Good hunting, human. It was good to be a soldier again, even if our army was very small.”

The gnolls stalked toward the exit. Singing softly, Bareris headed for the arch.